I’ve been reviewing classic papers about simplicity, complexity, and adjacent topics, both for my current series of essays and an essay I’m writing for Onward! So far I have reviewed (or downloaded for review): • Herbert A. Simon, The Architecture of Complexity (1962) • Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? (1968) • Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building (1985) • Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (1986) • Richard P. Gabriel, Worse is Better (1991) • Rich Hickey, Simple Made Easy (2011) What am I missing? What else should be on that list?

Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" ... IMO, "simplicity" is a relative term - it's in the eyes of the beholder. All of the above-mentioned papers are relevant to developers, not users. Researchers appear to think that Lambda Calculus is beautifully simple and expressive, whereas webpage designers would not agree - L.C. contains too much nuance (complexity) for their purposes.

Pace Layers by Stewart Brand is probably related https://github.com/Little-Languages/reading-club/tree/main/topics/pace%20layers

“simplicity" is a relative term - it’s in the eyes of the beholder

Yeah, that’s not a widely spread belief in software circles, yet. My essay is going to address that. And surely the papers I listed all explicitly or implicitly assume that simplicity can be objectively defined. Curiously, most of them just assume but don’t attempt to define it. Hickey gets bonus points, because he actually does.

FYI - my favourite definition of simplicity is "the lack of nuance" (it came from an online dictionary, but, I can't seem find it again to properly reference it)

Out of the Tar Pit?

Big Ball of Mud? http://laputan.org/mud/mud.html

At this point I think it's good to think about the demographic of the writers you're reading, and look outside the cul de sac you might be in..

Hofstadter gets into the intuitive nature of simplicity (which he puts adjacent to beauty) in a few GEB passages

I forget. The APL guy. Turing award. He said some good stuff.

@Stephen De Gabrielle The APL guy must be Kenneth E. Iverson, his most popular paper probably Notation as a Tool of Thought. Did you mean that one?

Ungar & Smith “SELF: The Power of Simplicity” https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/self-power.pdf

• Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop (same author of the Dream Machine) • Living with Complexity by Don Norman • Making Things Work by Yaneer Bar-Yam • I also enjoyed a lot the season 2 of the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity podcast